Innovating Pedagogy Report

Posted on December 8, 2014 by Judy O'Connell

Once again the Open University has provided another Innovating Pedagogy report – the third report in it’s series. This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teacher and policy makers in productive innovation.

Download the 2014 Innovating Pedagogy Report

Produced by the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University, the report identifies ten educational terms, theories and practices that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice in the near future.

Featured in 2014’s annual report:

Massive open social learning
Learning design informed by analytics
Flipped classrooms
Bring your own devices
Learning to learn
Dynamic assessment
Event-based learning
Learning through storytelling
Threshold concepts
Bricolage

While MOOCs and other theories covered in this year’s report are not necessarily new, the report aimed to examine how they can gather momentum and have a greater influence on education.

I find the greatest value of this report is to see the changes taking place – a litmus test – of what is considered relevant/important and/or of note. I would also juxtapose the findings against the series of NMC Horizon Reports, which cover a range of school, tertiary, and library sectors.

Look out for other annual reports in your country, sector, or region too!

Image: creative commons licensed (BY-NC) flickr photo by Intersection Consulting: http://flickr.com/photos/intersectionconsulting/7537238368

Leadership in a Connected Age

Posted on September 12, 2014 by Judy O'Connell

A great gathering of educators today in Melbourne for the SchoolsTechOZ conference. Always a favourite, and as always a great lineup of speakers and workshop leaders.

Here are the slides for my presentation in the afternoon. Not identical, but the main links that attendees might be looking for are all there 🙂 . I’m looking forward to digging into some of this a little more deeply at my workshops tomorrow.

Horizon Report 2012 – Higher Education

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Judy O'Connell

Trend-spotting is an interesting passtime, much loved by the media and futurists alike. However, there are some publications that provide an annual review of global developments that make essential reading.

The internationally recognized NMC Horizon Reports is one of these publications. These series of reports identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years in education around the globe. To create each report, an international body of experts in education, technology, and other fields is convened as an advisory board to work on a set of research questions intended to surface
significant trends and challenges and to identify a wide array of potential technologies for the report.

Each of the three global editions of the NMC Horizon Report — higher education, primary and secondary education, and museum education — highlight six emerging technologies or practices that are likely to enter mainstream use with their focus sectors within three adoption horizons over the next five years.

(I am very lucky to have been an advisory board member of the K-12 Edition since its inception – and am currently immersed in the 2012 edition discussions at the moment).

The 2012 Higher Education Edition has recenlty been published, and is available here. It makes very interesting reading for me as I work with a new cohort of postgraduate students and see how well student capabilities align with the changing landscape of learning.

Key trends:

People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.
The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
The world of work is increasingly collaborative, driving changes in the way student projects are structured.
The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as
educators.
Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning and collaborative models.
There is a new emphasis in the classroom on more challenge-based and active learning.

The areas of emerging technology to watch :

Time to adoption: One Year or Less

Mobile Apps
Tablet Computing

Time to adoption: Two to Three Years

Game-based Learning
Learning Analytics

Time to adoption: Four to Five Year

Gesture-based Computing
Internet of Things

NMC Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by paul (dex)

Daily Education and Technology News for Schools 02/13/2012 (coolcatteacher.blogspot.com)
6 Technologies to Watch in Higher Ed (hollymccracken.wordpress.com)
Ten Meta-trends impacting learning (heyjude.wordpress.com)

Horizon Project 2011 and K-12 edition

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Judy O'Connell

The Horizon Project 2011 has been launched, and each year it’s findings are received with interest and vigorous debate.

The internationally recognized series of Horizon Reports is part of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, a comprehensive research venture established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years on a variety of sectors around the globe. This volume, the 2011 Horizon Report, examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. It is the eighth in the annual series of reports focused on emerging technology in the higher education environment. To create the report, the Horizon Project’s Advisory Board, an international body of experts in education, technology, business, and other fields, engaged in a discussion based on a set of research questions intended to surface significant trends and challenges and to identify a broad array of potential technologies for the report.

This report is essential reading each year, and available as a pdf download from http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2011-Horizon-Report.pdf or Download ePub version or View and comment on web version

Over the course of just a few weeks, the Advisory Board came to a consensus about the six topics that appear here in the 2011 Horizon Report. On the near-term horizon — that is, within the next 12 months — are mobile computing and open content. The second adoption horizon is set two to three years out, where we will begin to see widespread adoptions of two well-established technologies that have taken off by making use of the global cellular networks — electronic books and simple augmented reality.On the far-term horizon, set at four to five years away for widespread adoption, but clearly already in use in some quarters, are gesture-based computing and visual data analysis.

The Horizon Report K-12 Edition

If you work in K-12 education, read this report. However, the The Horizon Report K-12 Edition will be available in May, which should be in time for you to write your visionary plans and budget proposals ready for 2012.

Once again I’m excited to have been invited to join the Advisory Board for 2011. The Advisory Board uses their expertise to place the technologies we consider for the report on adoption timelines, and to rank their potential impacts on education. As a member of the Advisory Board, I’m included as part of an extraordinary group of multi-disciplinary thinkers from both within and outside education. Participation on the Horizon.K12 Advisory Board is by invitation only, and completely voluntary. Leslie Conery (ISTE), Keith Krueger (CoSN), and Larry Johnson (NMC) will serve as the co-principal investigators for the work this year.

Track the progress of the report at the Horizon Report: K-12 Edition Wiki.

Thanks Larry and Alan 🙂

Innovation and attention ~ locally

Posted on October 9, 2010 by Judy O'Connell

For many campuses [and schools], the question is which learning technologies to support locally to support deeper student engagement with learning.

The information in the Horizon Report, published annually by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and the New Media Consortium (NMC), can help.² The report identifies and describes the key trends and critical challenges associated with those emerging technologies that are likely to have a significant impact on teaching, learning, creative inquiry, and student engagement in higher education over the next five years. It categorizes six areas of emerging technologies within three adoption horizons: a year or less, two to three years, and four to five years. A quick review of the report and its vast collection of examples and practices can serve as the preliminary research needed for an institution to proceed tactically.

This article from Educause Review addresses three technologies from the 2010 Horizon Report: electronic books, mobile computing, and open content. Both mobile computing and open content are within the one-year-or-less time-to-adoption; electronic books are in the two-to-three-years adoption horizon.

Read the full article ~ Deploying Innovation Locally.

Other articles in the current issue Attention, Engagement, and the Next Generation — Volume 45, Number 5, September/October 2010 – are also worth reading.

Howard Rheingold’s article has some important points for us all to consider in Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies. Always enjoy reading Howard’s thoughts!

If we want to discover how we can engage students as well as ourselves in the 21st century, we must move beyond skills and technologies. We must explore also the interconnected social media literacies of attention, participation, cooperation, network awareness, and critical consumption.

Although I consider attention to be fundamental to all the other literacies, the one that links together all the others, and although it is the one I will spend the most time discussing in this article, none of these literacies live in isolation.¹ They are interconnected. You need to learn how to exercise mindful deployment of your attention online if you are going to become a critical consumer of digital media; productive use of Twitter or YouTube requires knowledge of who your public is, how your participation meets their needs (and what you get in return), and how memes flow through networked publics. Ultimately, the most important fluency is not in mastering a particular literacy but in being able to put all five of these literacies together into a way of being in digital culture.

Learning Spaces | EDUCAUSE (educause.edu)

Emerging technologies = librarian

Posted on May 13, 2009 by Judy O'Connell

Thanks to my friend (and fellow chocoholic) Kathryn Greenhill for sharing this fabulous set of slides and presentation – which really puts into perspective what librarians should be about – if they aren’t already!!

The challenges are bigger in schools – emerging technologies are not seen as core business! But let’s be clear about this. We are not talking about ‘using’ technology – but rather about changing our whole mode of operation to deal with disruptive change – and dare I say it? to actively create disruptive change for the sake of the learners in our schools.

Kathryn is a tertiary emerging technologies librarian. What she shares is equally vital and relevant for schools.